Class, ethnicity, and voting behaviour in Australia

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Abstract
This paper assesses the importance of a range of social structural influences on Australian electoral behaviour, with specific reference to ethnicity and occupational class. The analysis is conducted on two levels. Firstly, aggregate level data is employed, using the 1976 census matched by federal electorate to the 1977 election results. Techniques from factorial ecology are used to construct conceptually unambiguous measures of constituency characteristics, and these are related to voting behaviour using multivariate techniques. Secondly, individual level survey data collected in 1979 are used to confirm the importance of the socioeconomic cleavage and urban‐rural divisions. They also indicate that ethnicity has an appreciable influence on electoral behaviour among those born in Mediterranean countries. Northern Europeans (mainly British) prove to be no different in their electoral behaviour than native‐born Australians, while the results for Eastern Europeans are inconclusive.